TAEWON AHN

The development of the internet in Korea is deeply intertwined with Taewon Ahn’s artwork. In 1969 after the initial form of the internet, ARPANET connected UCLA and SRI in California. The second international internet connection was established in 1982 between the University of Hawaii and Seoul National University. In 1989, the installation of the TPC-3 submarine cable connecting the United States and Asia across the Pacific Ocean significantly increased the amount of information being transmitted and accelerated internet accessibility. Korea’s internet expansion progressed rapidly in alignment with the country’s economic development, accelerating significantly after the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

During the Japanese colonial period and following the Korean War, the flattened geography of Korea was left disconnected from localities, enabling the rapid establishment of new industries and communication infrastructure. Korea then transitioned to the internet space, a shift that played a crucial role in shaping the country’s culture, highlighted today in global communities like K-culture and K-pop. However, this transformation also bred intense competition and success-driven motives, contributing to polarisation within Korean society.

Examining Korea’s rapid internet expansion and economic development reveals a correlation between the two. According to reports from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Korea’s internet penetration was 0.1% in 1995 but surged to 49.2% by 2000. This sharp increase coincided with rapid economic growth during the same period, demonstrating that informatisation acted as a significant catalyst for economic development. However, this flow of capital also exacerbated polarisation in modern society. The fundamental contradiction of this capitalist trend undermines the intrinsic motivation of life—manifesting in a hybridised identity crisis about how and why we should live.

In this context, Taewon Ahn has continued his creative activities by treating the internet as material. He views the internet as a companion material and creates his works through networks of relationships with the internet. His artworks do not simply reproduce information, but express the internet as a material element deeply embedded in everyday life. For instance, he portrays his companion cat ‘Hiro’ through drawings or sculptures, highlighting distortions of information in the digital space. Despite focusing on cats, his works evoke images resembling insects, other animals, and even architectural forms, reflecting the hybrid nature of the internet and forming an identity of companionate relationship with it.

Ahn’s work goes beyond merely reproducing digital images or expressing digital sensitivity. It presents a unique form intertwined with the materiality of the internet. This reflects the contradictory lives of modern individuals who, despite being strongly connected to the world via the internet, paradoxically may not want to connect with anything. Taewon Ahn’s choice to focus on our immediate surroundings, particularly experiences accumulated deeply and internally, sensitively responds to his nuanced interaction with the interwoven internet. Similar to the concepts mentioned in Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto,’ Ahn explores the tactile exploration of hybrid identities embedded in everyday experiences and self-empathy as a new form of human-machine interaction with the internet.

Through this exhibition, P21 aims to illuminate Taewon Ahn’s recent artistic world exploring new identities in response to nearby existence and interaction with the internet. The exhibition title PPURI (roots) is derived from Taewon Ahn’s online account name, metaphorically expressing the spreading of internet cables like roots. It also connects to artists using airbrush to spread paint, encapsulating an integrated identity of the virtual and the real. To achieve this, proactive staging is attempted, particularly proposing the exhibition space as a venue revealing Ahn’s process of creating artworks. Throughout the exhibition walls, marks akin to scars left by burning objects at an incineration site intersect with shadows and traces of artworks. This seems to depict the process of informatisation through actual energy consumption on the internet, akin to seeing the shadows left by humans during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, an idea that inspired the artist. This seeks to create a place where one can tactically experience the complex identity of modern individuals grown in the interconnected world of the internet and the material exchanges arising from their relationship with it.

The exhibition PPURI serves as a defining moment for Taewon Ahn, positioning himself as a sort of ‘companion species’ to the internet. Moving beyond the dichotomy of digitally reproducing reality or vice versa, he presents himself as an artist who explores artistic expression methods within a companionate relationship with the internet environment. This marks a starting point where he showcases his identity as an artist navigating the internet environment and its companionate relationship, rather than adhering to binary perspectives. Through this, he lays the groundwork for expanding his artistic world as a product of the material network where the internet, humans, and the environment interact. Furthermore, it is expected to provide an opportunity for contemplating how the internet impacts our lives in contemporary society and reflecting on the materiality of the internet where we and numerous entities have rooted ourselves.